MSU Red Cedar Message Board

The "I says" drives me nuts. My mom does it all the time. None of her kids do I think she started doing this later in life for some reason

I would have fired her on the spot.

Actually, the fact that "seen" is the past participle makes it much more likely to replace "saw" as the past tense. The vast majority of English verbs are identical in the past tense and past participle, so children learn very early in their language development to use the same word for each. Irregular forms take longer to learn, so "I seen" would be a very common mistake with small children for a couple of years. Keeping the non-irregular form as an adult is a fairly easy change to make, linguistically speaking.

FWIW, "dived -> dove" was an incorrect application of ablaut, making it analogous to "drive-drove." It's one of the odd (and relatively rare) changes from regular verbs to irregular.

Ebonics

That one always messes me up too, but it makes sense. You can consider two separate definitions of "hang:" one kills somebody, and the other refers to hanging something up. "Hanged" is the past tense for the first one, "hung" for the rest. No, I don't know where that came from.

My mom and her tea buddies have recently starting using "be" instead of "am". Like "I be tired" or " I be hungry". It pisses me the hell off.

For those of you seriously bothered by a slight deviation from perfect English, keep in mind that in a two way communications, it is the responsibility of the sender to insure a message is clear. When the phrase in this topic is used, the meaning is perfectly clear which creates a perfect communication. What could possibly be wrong with that?

These phrases are more dialect than un-education. I know the proper use of many terms but do not use them, by preference. I love using terms that my father or grandfather used.

I work with many people who do not have “formal” educations who are smart and productive as hell and can run circles around our college kids.

Finally, to the dude who claims he doesn’t like interacting with “common folk”………you are missing out. There are great people out there, all ages, all colors, all levels of education.

Illinoizeee

You gone went there now.

Mid Michigan vernacular. Also "them guys".

Uncle

It's almost certainly replacing "I saw." Certain dialects might swap a few words, but they very very rarely eliminate entire tenses.

The most endangered species in our nation isn't a big woodpecker or some freshwater fish. It's the tongue in our heads. Listen to the truncated bastard language of today. The average vocabulary is a third of what it was 100 years ago. The landscape of vocabulary is being hacked down and grubbed up by the drivel of pop culture, poisoned by lazy obscenity, infantilized by a youth-obsessed media.

Ask people today what the definition of syntax is and they will probably tell you it's something Vegas brothels have to pay the IRS